[Gambas-user] "New" gambas-basic.org website

[Adrien Prokopowicz]

Le 10/02/2018 à 09:41, Christof Thalhofer a écrit :
> Hi,
> 
> Am 10.02.2018 um 06:44 schrieb Adrien Prokopowicz:
> 
>>> As I said to Benoît earlier, if we put the website generator on its
>>> dedicated repository, we can use the GitLab Pages service[0] to host it,
>>> which has two advantages :
>>>
>>> - GitLab handles all the traffic for the website (for free), so we won't
>>> have any infrastructure issues for whatever load the website might
>>> generate.
> 
> But has the downside that we rely to the existence and friendlyness of
> another firm – with the danger of beeing in the same situation like with
> SF in a couple of years.

Of course, that is still a risk (although I don't think moving away from 
GitLab would be as painful as it was for SF, but your point still stands).

We could find another hosting provider than GitLab so we don't have as 
many things relying on them, but it only shifts the problem : we still 
depend on a provider.

The only real alternative would be to host it ourselves (or rather, 
hosted by someone), but that has several downsides has well :

- We have to find someone nice enough to host and maintain the site at 
their own cost (both in time and money). I know there are plenty of nice 
people on this list, but I don't think many can afford both the monetary 
and time (although I would love to be proved wrong here ;-) ).
- If that person can't handle the hosting anymore (because life 
happens), we're back to the same problem we had by choosing GitLab (or 
even SF) : we will have to move again. If I remember correctly, this was 
exactly the situation we were in with the old wiki (gambasdoc.org).
- Personnally, I would pefer if this very nice person would spend its 
free time contributing to the Gambas project or community, rather than 
juggling with servers. :-)
- If we end up not liking GitLab's service, we can just dump them (just 
like we did with SF). It's harder to do that with a personally-donated 
service.

And there are still quite some technical requirements to have a service 
on par with GitLab's : keeping the servers up-to-date (see Heartbleed, 
Meltdown & Spectre …), handling the hardware, having a redundant 
architecture with multiple servers (preferably on separate physical 
locations), managing horizontal scalability, setting up a deployment 
system for all the nodes, handling automatic failover and load-balancing 
(preferably at the IP layer), having monitoring and alerts for the 
administrator, and probably a whole bunch more…

My point is : it's just as likely for a person to disappear as it is for 
a service, but most likely the quality won't be the same. And 
considering how little it would cost to change hosting providers (this 
is litteraly just a repository to move and a domain config to edit), I 
don't think it is worth the hassle of getting someone to support the 
site. :-)

(Disclaimer : I spent two years at work wasting time struggling to get 
servers running rather than doing actual development. I might be biased!)

> Can these pages been delivered as www.gambas-basic.org?

Yes, with GitLab Pages you can make any domain point to the pages (as 
long as you can add a CNAME entry in the domain's configuration).

> 
>> I've used a bit of fancy Git magic (thanks git filter-branch !) to
>> extract the MakeWebSite directory to a new repository, along with its
>> entire history.
>>
>> I've put it on my account for now[0], but if Benoît agrees I'll move it
>> back to the gambas organization. :-)
> 
> It is already there :-) ... in the repo :-) ... in my repo :-)

Can you give me a link ? I searched for "Christof Thalhofer" on GitLab 
but with no success …

>> I've noticed there is some code that is specific to Benoît's file
>> system, so right now I'm working on making this code into a portable
>> Static Site Generator (i.e. a script that anyone can run without issues,
>> and which simply outputs the static files in a given directory).
> 
> Like Hugo and such?

The principle is the same yes (source code => some process => static 
files), but not nearly as sophisticated as any established generators 
out there. I'm cleaning it up a little, but in the end it's just going 
to be some simple template files being rendered to HTML (for every 
supported language). :-)

> I recently found a password  in the sources ... !°"§$%-/

Which sources are you talking about ? I looked into the MakeWebSite 
sources but I haven't found anything …

If you meant in the main Gambas source, please email me its location 
privately, I'll see if I can remove it from the Git history (without 
breaking everything).

-- 
Adrien Prokopowicz